AMD and other bargains in the UK

EVERYONE IS concentrated on the higher end of the Sempron family with the Sempron 3100+ standing firmly in the limelight. However, one should not forget the rest of that band. The slowest of them is the Sempron 2200+ which costs £31 at Hercules 3D Prophet 9800Pro is probably the last graphic card to be manufactured by Hercules/Guillemot since the latter has decided to leave this market because of the competition. The specs for this card are pretty amazing. 256-bit memory interface, 8-pixel pipeline engine, 128MB RAM, DirectX 9.0, 380MHz/680MHz core/clock frequency, Anisotropic Filtering up to X16 and Full Scene Anti-Aliasing up to 6x.

The card is a pulled one and is sold on its own. It does however carry a 30 days RTB warranty. The next cheapest Radeon 9800 Pro is from Evesham and costs £125. Don't want the full power of the Radeon 9800 Pro, then slide down one notch to the 3D Prophet 9700 Pro available for £70.50, a really extraordinary price for a mid-range to top range graphic card. Compatible with DirectX9, it features a 620Mhz memory frequency and a 325MHz core frequency.

In addition, the 3D Prophet 9700 includes a copper base for the cooling fan, a silent cooling fan and heatsink for cooling fans. A heatsink for dissipating heat on the underside of the board is also present. You should fairly easily be able to clock both graphic cards to good levels. As usual, buy it while you can.

SVP Communications is a small web-only outfit but does provide very good products. Especially this weekend, since it is offering a five per cent discount for all those buying over £20 from them and who will enter the word "datawritepremium" in the appropriate field before 23:59 Sunday night. Armed with my £20 note, I made my shopping list. 50 Blank DVD-R from Datawrite. The RED V3 is an A-Grade media which can be written easily at 4x. Using CDburnerXP, you might even get it written at slightly more than that provided that your DVD Writer can achieve everything between 4x and 8x.

Each disc cost me 15p + VAT I also included two 240 discs carrying cases at £3.19+VAT each. Next are eight Fameart Rechargeable batteries for 41p+VAT each. These are AA Ni-MH batteries - rated 1300mAH - and not cheapo obsolete Ni-CD. The whole lot cost me only £24+VAT. In comparison, on Ebay the CD holder costs £10.64, four rechargeable batteries costs £3.99 - freepost and 25 blank datawrite DVD costs £7.49. Purchasing the same bundle on ebay would have costs me nearly £42.

Morgancomputers is selling a base unit which makes it ideal for someone upgrading their old computer. The Advent 3211 includes an Athlon XP 2200+ processor coupled with an Elite LVMM motherboard powered by a VIA KM266chipset, 512MB PC2100 DDR memory and a 100GB hard disk drive. As optical drive, you will have a 40x LG CD Writer completed by a 16x Literon DVD Rom. The graphic card provided is the ATI Radeon 8500LE with 128MB memory.

While it is not the best graphic card available, you can be sure that it will best any onboard graphic card including the nForce one and don't forget that it is not shared. The Sound module provided is an Avance Sound Max which supports AC97. In addition, you get one Conexant Winmodem and one Realtek 8100 LAN ethernet module. On top of that you get four USB 2.0 ports, three PCI slots, one AGP and one CNR module. From the picture provided, it seems also that you will have a floppy disk as well as some kind of memory card reader, Windows XP Home and Works 7.0. The unit seems to be quite sturdy and "brand-consistent". Advent is a major seller via high street stores like PC World or Dixons. The system costs £280+VAT. µ